Getting started

What is a build process?

A build process is a sequence of tasks, usually automated, that you run each time that you want to deploy a new release of your application. cssnano fits into this build process as a tool that should be run on your development CSS, and in turn will create compressed production assets. These are then uploaded to your production server or CDN.

There are a number of different ways that you can compose a build process; we recommend using the command line, but you might also want to consider an abstraction such as gulp, especially for more complex systems.

Installing Node.js & npm

cssnano is installed using the command line, using npm; so you will need to use an application such as Terminal or the Windows Command Prompt. If you don't already have Node.js installed, then you'll need to install it.

We require a minimum of Node.js version 10.13.0 to run, and we recommend that you install nvm to manage your Node.js versions.

Alternately, you can visit the Node.js website and follow the instructions there to install it for your machine.

cssnano is a PostCSS plugin, so running cssnano also requires installing PostCSS. Once you have installed Node.js & npm, you can run this command to install cssnano and PostCSS into your project:

npm install cssnano postcss --save-dev

Note that for most typical setups, we recommend that you compress your CSS during your deployment step, so that when it is uploaded to your server/CDN it is already optimized. In most cases, you should not need to install cssnano on your web server.

Using PostCSS CLI

Once you have cssnano installed, you will need a PostCSS runner in order to use it to compress your CSS files. We recommend the PostCSS command line module, but you can use any of the alternatives listed in the next section.

You can install PostCSS CLI with this command:

npm install --save-dev postcss-cli

Once you have done this, you will need to configure cssnano by creating a postcss.config.js file in the root of your project. This should contain cssnano as well as any other plugins that you might want for your project; as an example:

module.exports = {
    plugins: [
        require('cssnano')({
            preset: 'default',
        }),
    ],
};

Read more about presets in our presets guide.

You can now minify your CSS files! Try it out by creating a CSS file in your project named input.css, with some styles in there. Then, run:

npx postcss input.css > output.css

You should then see an output.css with the same styles but compressed!

Note that you can also find a basic example in our GitHub repository.

Getting started

What is a build process?

Installing Node.js & npm

Using PostCSS CLI

Alternatives to using the CLI

Grunt

Gulp

Webpack

Others